Whistling Past the Graveyard (21 page)

“Hey!” snapped Bell. “This isn’t a goddamn debate. I gave you an order and—”

“And I don’t believe it. Put the captain on the line, or come here with a signed order from him or someone higher, but I’m not going to death row because you’re suddenly losing your shit.”

The line went dead.

We sat there and stared at each other.

Ferris rubbed his fingers over the bandage Talia had used to dress his bite. His eyes were jumpy.

“What’s going on?” he asked. It sounded like a simple question, but we all knew that it wasn’t. That question was a tangle of all sorts of barbed wire and broken junk.

I got up and walked over to the wall of sandbags.

We’d stacked them two deep and chest high, but suddenly it felt as weak as a little picket fence. We still had a whole stack of empty bags we hadn’t filled yet. We didn’t think we’d need to, and they were heavy as shit. I nudged them with the toe of my boot.

I didn’t even have to ask. Suddenly we were all filling the bags and building the wall higher and deeper. In the end, we used every single bag.

-5-

“Sal,” called Talia, holding up the walkie-talkie, “the Loot’s calling.”

I took it from her, but it wasn’t Lieutenant Bell, and it wasn’t the captain, either.

“Corporal Tucci?” said a gruff voice that I didn’t recognize.

“Yes, sir, this is Tucci.”

“This is Major Bradley.”

Farris mouthed,
Oh shit.

“Sir!” I said, and actually straightened like I was snapping to attention.

“Lieutenant Bell expressed your concerns over the orders he gave you.”

Here it comes
, I thought.
I’m dead or I’m in Leavenworth.

“Sir, I—”

“I understand your concerns, Corporal,” he said. “Those concerns are natural; they show compassion and an honorable adherence to the spirit of who we are as soldiers of this great nation.”

Talia rolled her eyes and mimed shoveling shit, but the Major’s opening salvo was scaring me. It felt like a series of jabs before an overhand right.

“But we are currently faced with extraordinary circumstances that are unique in my military experience,” continued Major Bradley. “We are confronted by a situation in which our fellow citizens are the enemy.”

“Sir, I don’t—”

He cut me off. “Let me finish, Corporal. You need to hear this.”

“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”

He cleared his throat. “We are facing a biological threat of an unknown nature. It is very likely a terrorist weapon of some kind, but quite frankly, we don’t know. What we do know is that the infected are a serious threat. They are violent, they are mentally deranged, and they will attack anyone with whom they come into contact, regardless of age, sex, or any other consideration. We have reports of small children attacking grown men. Anyone who is infected becomes violent. Old people, pregnant women…it, um…doesn’t seem to matter.” Bradley faltered for a moment, and I wondered if the first part of what he’d said was repeated from orders
he
got and now he was on his own. We all waited.

And waited.

Finally, I said, “Sir?”

But there was no answer.

I checked the walkie-talkie. It was functioning, but Major Bradley had stopped transmitting.

“What the hell?” I said.

“Maybe there’s interference,” suggested Joe Bob.

I looked around. “Who’s got a cell?”

We all had cell phones.

We all called.

I called my brother Vinnie in Newark.

“Sal—Christ on a stick, have you seen the news?” he growled. “Everyone’s going ape-shit.”

“SAL!”

I spun around and saw Talia pointing past the sandbags.

“They’re coming!
”

They.

God. They.

-6-

The road was thick with them.

Maybe forty. Maybe fifty.

All kinds of them.

Guys in suits. Women in skirts and blouses. Kids. A diner waitress in a pink uniform. A man dressed in surgical scrubs. People.

Just people.

Them.

They didn’t rush us.

They
walked
down the road toward the bridge. I think that was one of the worst parts of it. I might have been able to deal with a bunch of psychos running at me. That would have felt like an attack. You see a mob running batshit at you and you switch your M4s to rock’n’roll and hope that all of them are right with Jesus.

But they walked.

Walked.

Badly. Some of them limped. I saw one guy walking on an ankle that you could see was broken from fifty yards out. It was buckled over to the side, but he didn’t give a shit. There was no wince, no flicker on his face.

The whole bunch of them were like that. None of them looked right. They were bloody. They were ragged.

They were mauled.

“God almighty,” whispered Farris.

Talia began saying a Hail Mary.

I heard Joe Bob saying, “Fuck yeah, fuck yeah, fuck yeah.” But something in his tone didn’t sell it for me. His face was greasy with sweat and his eyes were jumpier than a speed freak’s.

The crowd kept coming to us. I’d had to hang up on Vinnie.

“They’re going to crawl right over these damn sandbags,” complained Farris. The bandage around his wrist was soaked through with blood.

“What do we do?” asked Farris.

He already knew.

When they were fifteen yards away, we opened up.

We burned through at least a mag each before we remembered about shooting them in the head.

Talia screamed it first, and then we were all screaming it. “The head! Shoot for the head!”

“Switch to semi-auto,” I hollered. “Check your targets, conserve your ammo.”

We stood in a line, our barrels flashing and smoking, spitting fire at the people as they crowded close.

They went down.

Only if we took them in the head. Only then.

At that range, though, we couldn’t miss. They walked right up to the barrels. They looked at us as we shot them.

“Jesus, Sal,” said Talia as we swapped our mags. “Their eyes. Did you see their eyes?”

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t have to. When someone is walking up to you and not even ducking away from the shot, you see everything.

We burned through three-quarters of our ammunition.

The air stank of smoke and blood.

Farris was the last one to stop shooting. He was laughing as he clicked on empty, but when he looked back at the rest of us, we could see that there were tears pouring down his cheeks.

The smoke clung to the moment, and for a while, that’s all I could see. My mouth was a thick paste of cordite and dry spit. When the breeze came up off the river, we stared into the reality of what we had just done.

“They were all sick, right?” asked Talia. “I mean…they were all infected, right? All of them?”

“Yeah,” I said, but what the hell did I know?

We stood there for a long time. None of us knew what the hell to do.

Later, when I tried to call the Major again, I got nothing.

The same thing with the cells. I couldn’t even get a signal.

None of us could.

“Come on,” I said after a while, “check your ammo.”

We did. We had two magazines each, except for Farris, who had one.

Two mags each.

It didn’t feel like it was going to be enough.

Talia grabbed my sleeve. “What the hell do we do?”

They all looked at me. Like I knew what the fuck was what.

“We hold this fucking bridge,” I said.

-7-

No more of them came down the road.

Not then.

Not all afternoon.

Couple of times we heard—or thought we heard—gunfire from way upriver. Never lasted long.

The sun started to fall behind the trees, and it smeared red light over everything. Looked like the world was on fire. I saw Talia staring at the sky for almost fifteen minutes.

“What?” I asked.

“Planes,” she said.

I looked up. Way high in the sky there were some contrails, but the sky was getting too dark to see what they were. Something flying in formation, though.

Joe Bob was on watch, and he was talking to himself. Some Bible stuff. I didn’t want to hear what it was.

Instead, I went to the Jersey side of the bridge and looked up and down the road. Talia and Farris came with me, but there was nothing to see.

“Maybe they made a public service announcement,” said Talia. “Like the Emergency Broadcast Network thing. Maybe they told everyone to stay home, stay off the roads.”

“Sure,” I said in pretty much the same way you’d say ‘bullshit.’

We watched the empty road as the sky grew darker.

“We could just leave,” said Farris. “Head up the road. There’s that Quiznos. Maybe we can find a ride.”

“We can’t leave the bridge,” I said.

“Fuck the bridge.”

I got up in his face. “Really? You want to let
them
just stroll across the bridge? Is that your plan? Is that what you think will get the job done?”

“What job? We’re all alone out here. Might as well have been on the far side of the goddamn moon.”

“They’ll come back for us,” I said. “You watch; in the morning there’ll be a truck with supplies, maybe some hot coffee.”

“Sure,” he said, in exactly the same way I had a minute ago.

-8-

That night, there were a million stars and a bright three-quarter moon. Plenty of light to see the road. Only one of them came down the road. Talia was on watch and she took it down with a single shot to the head. She let the thing—it used to be a mailman—walk right up to the sandbags. It opened its mouth, even though it was too far away to bite, and Talia shot it in the eye.

Then she sat down and cried like a little girl for ten whole minutes. I stood her watch and let her cry. I wished I could do that. For me, it was all stuck inside and it was killing me that I couldn’t let it go.

-9-

Farris got sick in the night.

I heard him throwing up, and I came over and shined my flashlight on him. His face was slick with sweat. Joe Bob went back to the wall and Talia knelt next to me. She knew more First Aid than I did, and she took Farris’s vitals as best she could.

“Wow, he’s burning up,” she said, looking at his fever-bright eyes and sweaty face, but then she put her palm on his forehead and frowned. “That’s weird. He’s cold.”

“Shock?” I asked, but she didn’t answer.

Then she examined the bite and I heard her gasp. When I shined my light on Farris’s arm, I had to bite my lip. The wound on Farris’s wrist was bad enough, but there were weird black lines running all the way up his arm. It was like someone had used a Sharpie to outline every vein and capillary.

“It’s infection,” said Talia, but I knew that it was worse than that.

“God,” gasped Farris, “it’s blood poisoning.”

I said nothing, because I thought it was worse than that, too. Even in the harsh glare of the flashlight, his color looked weird.

Talia met my eyes over the beam of the light. She didn’t say anything, but we had a whole conversation with that one look.

I patted Farris on the shoulder. “You get some sleep, man. In the morning we’ll get a medic down here to give you a shot, set you right.”

Fear was jumping up in his eyes. “You sure? They can give me something for this?”

“Yeah. Antibiotics and shit.”

Talia fished in her first-aid kit. There was a morphine syrrette. She showed it to me and I nodded.

“Sweet dreams, honey,” she said as she jabbed Farris with the little needle. His eyes held hers for a moment, and then he was out.

We made sure he was comfortable and then we got up and began walking up and down the length of the bridge. Talia kept looking up at the moon.

“Pretty night,” I said.

She made a face.

“
Should
be a pretty night,” I amended.

We stopped for a moment and looked down at the rushing water. It was running fast and high after that big storm a couple of days ago, and each little wave-tip gleamed with silver moonlight. Maybe fifteen, twenty minutes passed while we stood there, our shoulders a few inches apart, hands on the cold metal rail, watching the river do what rivers do.

“Sally?” she asked softly.

“Yeah?”

“This is all happening, right?”

I glanced at her. “What do you mean?”

She used her fingers to lightly trace circles on the inside of her forearm. “You know I used to ride the spike, right? I mean, that’s not news.”

“I figured.”

“I’ve been getting high most of my life. Since…like seventh grade. Used to swipe pills from my mom’s purse. She did a lot of speed, so that’s what I started on. Rode a lot of fast waves, y’know?”

“Yeah.” I was never much of a hophead, but I lived in Newark and I’d seen a lot of my friends go down in flames.

“Until I got clean the last time, I was probably high more than I was on the ground.”

I said nothing.

“So,” she continued, “I seen a lot of weird shit. While I was jonesing for a hit, while I was high, on the way down. You lose touch, y’know?”

“Yeah.”

“People talk about pink elephants and polka-dotted lobsters and shit, but that’s not what comes out of the woodwork.” She shivered and gripped the rail with more force. Like it was holding her there. “And not a day goes by—not a fucking day—when I don’t want a fix. Even now, twenty-three months clean, I can feel it. It’s like worms crawling under my skin. That morphine? You think I haven’t dreamed about that every night?”

I nodded. “My Uncle Tony’s been in and out of twelve steps for booze. I’ve seen how he looks at Thanksgiving when the rest of us are drinking beers and watching the ball game. Like he’d take a knife to any one of us for a cold bottle of Coors.”

“Right. Did your uncle ever talk to you about having a dry drunk? About feeling stoned and even seeing the spiders come crawling out of the sofa when he hasn’t even had a drop?”